Natural Resource Extractivism 

It’s easy to be blinded by the unique, physical beauty of La Guajira, a department (like a state) in northeast Colombia. The stark rocky cliffs at Cabo de la Vela rise above ocher-colored beaches, against a backdrop of stunning aquamarines. Lagoons abound with flamingos and exotic birds.

The more emblematic desert regions further inland are much drier and windier, receiving the northern trade winds and infrequent precipitation.

 La Guajira, in fact, is a 62-mile long peninsula, providing amazing contrasts with the open spaces of the sea, sand, and an immense unforgiving desert. Tragically, that natural beauty of La Guajira also offers a hard life for the 380,000 Wayúu, an Indigenous, ancestral community, which has endured  the extremes of a harsh, relentless landscape rich in natural resources subject to extractives extremes resulting in what many call a deeply tragic humanitarian crisis. The crisis, driven by an out-of-control, exploitative natural resource” alihuna” (foreign-origin)  extractivism (the taking of limited natural resources for the benefit of alihuna), has evolved historically in enough magnitude to threaten the health of the entire population, according to Colombia’s Indepaz, a Colombian non-profit focused on peace and development. The right to a healthy environment is recognized by the Colombian constitution, but legal environmental standards are very lenient and considerably below international standards, such as the European Union (EU) or World Health Organization (WHO). As a result, the Colombian Constitutional Court in 2013 ordered national environmental authorities to apply WHO standards, especially for extractive industries.

May 26th, 2016. La Guajira, Colombia. Rancheria Tulaa- Municipality of Manaure. A woman stands during the funeral of a 2 years old baby who died from sudden fever. Epidemics of fever have increased among Wayuu children since the rain started to fall again after four years of severe drought. Credit: @Nicolò Filippo Rosso IG: @nico.filipporosso

La Guajira is a desperately poor state in Colombia with levels of inequality, poverty and child mortality well above the national average. According to DANE (Columbia’s National Administrative Department of Statistics) the basic needs of 90% of the population go unmet, more than half of the population (53.3%) live in monetary poverty, and more than 60% of the province’s population lacks access to sewage system, electricity, or a water aqueduct. In La Guajira, only 14% or so of the rural population has access to potable water. At the same time, DANE has documented that La Guajira exhibits the highest child mortality rate in Colombia; 28% of children under five suffer from malnutrition.

Extractivism, from pearls, to salt and coal to clean energy has damaged the environment. To construct and operate the massive coal mines, for example, the largest known as El Cerrejón, more than fifty bodies of water, including the mighty Rancheria River, have either been diverted, or even appropriated by the coal companies. Other waterways have been destroyed by contamination. For example, El Cerrejon’s environmental compliance report in 2015 showed five different streams with values surpassing Colombian standards for cadmium, lead, chlorine and sulphates.

Over time, the evolving and growing scale of natural resource extractivism has robbed Wayúu of cultural norms and practices of conceptualizing their territory as a process of cultural, political and physical relationships that unite the elements of being Wayúu, meaning a “person” or “people.”

Portraits of La Guajira. Credit: @Nicolò Filippo Rosso IG: @nico.filipporosso

For instance, minerals, trees and the elements are considered living entities and determine their relationship with human beings. The lagoons, mountains, stones, even specific trees, can be spiritual sites and spaces of power through ritual practices. Minga (community work) exemplifies the use of ancestral knowledge in order to protect Wounmainkat’s (Mother Earth’s) life-giving winkat (water), for example. For the Wayúu, water’s manifestation as (juyaa-mobile) rain is a living being. The rain moistens the earth (mna-immobile) and life germinates and gives birth.

As Colombian Universidad Nacional Professor Astrid Ulloa has written,  “For the Wayúu, earth and water are a vital couple; they are the basic principle of their sociocultural territorial organization that interrelates two places of life.” The Wayúu’s Pütchipü’ü, (moral authorities) have called time and again for the preservation of both customs and territory, but always in vain.

How the evolution of unchecked extractivism will stop is at the center of an agenda of change for a country long plagued by deep inequalities. Complex political realities include a reformist president and a Congress that too often plays against him.

The Evolution of Out-of-Control Extractivism

Extractivism has threatened the Wayúu’s existence beginning hundreds of years ago. The 7,722= square mile peninsula has had an abundance of pearls, salt, coal, wind and sun. But extractivism has not benefited the Wayúu community. Rather the community has been consistently victimized and impoverished. In the process, as part of Petro’s policy to move away from dependence on fossil fuels, fracking of natural gas has been banned and no new exploration is allowed.

In the 16th century, the pearl and salt trade were much more than the simple pursuit of gems and spices. Rather, they were the platform for early expressions of human ingenuity and greed that catalyzed cultural attack and environmental exploitation. Documentation of pearl production in La Guajira, says Clyde MacKenzie in the 2023 Marine Fisheries Review, that may be the first record of resource decline in a marine fishery by excessive harvesting.

Early on, Spain monopolized the salt deposits in the Guajira area known as Manaure.  Salt territory was declared national patrimony by Spain. Over the years salt deposits there have been taxed, monopolized, regulated and fought over. The Wayúu have tried to claim the area as their ancestral land, and the Colombian government, after protracted lawsuits, has agreed at  various times in the 20th century that the Wayúu at least would have a minority interest with distributed earnings.  In 2002, it was finally established that partially funded earnings would be distributed between the municipality of Manaure and an Indigenous Wayúu association, Summon Ichi.

In this context, subsequent extractivist projects by the alihuna have been viewed by the Wayúu as all too familiar unfair resource exploitation repeating itself. For example, in the 20th century, coal mining in La Guajira has epitomized  the abandonment and neglect of the Wayúu by Colombia’s political elites in exchange for the neoliberal economic objective of foreign exchange earnings for the central government in Bogota. The Wayúu have not been beneficiaries.

El Cerrejón

El Cerrejón, owned by the Swiss multinational Glencore International AG,  is the largest in Latin America and one of the largest in the world. The 2001 mining code (Law 685) removed the Colombian government as a direct investor and at best made the government only a weak regulator. This concession, among others, has granted increased power to El Cerrejón in managing all of La Guajira’s natural resources, weakening any notion of responsibility by the government for the welfare of the local population.

Cerrejón forcibly displaced at least 15 Wayúu, Afro-Colombian and peasant communities from the mining zone. According to press reports, forcible displacements occurred around Cerrejón’s private port, too, and along its heavily militarized railway, which now divides the state.

“The Colombian government officials,” as Bucknell anthropologist Emma Banks has documented, “have largely refused to criticize, control, or discipline Cerrejón, because they depended on Cerrejón royalties for government programs and had personal ties to the company.”  Municipal and departmental governments had been receiving between 80% and 90% of royalties from mining projects in their jurisdiction. These royalties were supposed to invest in local development projects and improve education, health and infrastructure. But in 2012, the Juan Manuel Santos administration changed the split in royalties from natural resource extraction. Under the old law, La Guajira should have received around US$297 million yearly from coal mining royalties. Under the new law, between 2012 and 2014, it received between US$45 and 90 million.

By 2015 coal mining had become 60% of La Guajira’s modern economy, largely because the national government generously incentivized the abuse of environmental regulations for royalty and tax revenues.

The government royalty for Colombia was technically 22% “but if we figure in tax exemptions,” says Mario Valencia, an analyst at the Action Network for Free Trade ( RECLAME),  that number drops to 10%, and if we subtract environmental and social liabilities the result is negative, which is another way of saying that we are paying money to foreigners so that they come here to mine coal, oil, gold, or whatever.” In recent times, the weak reach of the national government has exacerbated disputes between insurgents, paramilitary groups, smugglers involved in illicit trade.  

National government revenues have not translated to significant improvements in the quality of life in La Guajira. According to a 2021 study by the Technische Universitat Berlin and the Universidad de Magdalena, only 2% of all employment in La Guajira is tied to Cerrejón. The mine has caused forced displacement and landlessness, made worse by armed conflict.

Portraits of La Guajira. Credit: @Nicolò Filippo Rosso IG: @nico.filipporosso

Often referred to as la bestia, (’the beast),’ Cerrejon uses 12 million gallons of water per day, which has exacerbated local inaccessibility of potable water for the average person, who has access to 0.7 liters of water a day.

The failure of the corruption-plagued Cercado Dam failed to consider basin-scale impacts when damning major waterway even if the promised aqueducts had been built to serve 15 municipalities properly connected to it. A number of researchers, including University of Valle (Cali) environmental economist Mario Alejandro Pérez , insist that the dam is supplying Cerrejón, a claim that the mine strongly denies.

There were once predictable rainy and dry seasons in La Guajira, but weather is now more unpredictable due to climate change. Weather models project a potential temperature rise of more than four degrees, and a decrease in precipitation of 30 to 40 percent by 2100. The recession of Colombia’s Tropical Mountain Glaciers, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), changing Sea Surface Temperatures (SST), among other causes, have influenced drought severity and its duration.

From 2012 to 2015, very little rain fell in La Guajira. Many of the large jagueys (traditional reservoirs) emptied. Very simply, higher temperatures caused the atmosphere to hold more water. And then when rain eventually did come, the accumulated moisture drenched mine-degraded and decertified land, which can’t absorb it. It’s in this way, that climate change has exacerbated droughts with crop failure and livestock die-off.

River diversion efforts and contamination of waterways have been significant. Various studies have documented toxic wastewater from the mine contaminated with zinc, lead, magnesium, and barium at points where El Cerrejón discharges wastewater into rivers and streams. A plan to divert a 16-mile section of the Ranchería River, in order to extract an estimated 500 million tons of coal underneath it, was suspended in 2012. More recent plans to divert another stream, the Arroyo Bruno, one of the most important tributaries of the Ranchería, which feeds underground aquifers, met with court orders to suspend the diversion.

The El Cerrejón coal train and its 110 carriages loaded with coal tear through the core desert every four hours or so covering the area with dust, especially when returning to the mine uncovered. Air quality has been degraded by coal dust, which can cause pulmonary and cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and respiratory illness, which is the second highest cause of death in many Wayuu communities, according to Dr. Ricardo José Romero at the local hospital in Barrancas. Not a single study has been done on the mine’s air quality hazards, according to Dr.  Romero, while as many as half of the patients arriving at local hospitals have acute respiratory problems.

Portraits of La Guajira. Credit: @Nicolò Filippo Rosso IG: @nico.filipporosso

Early closure, which has been extensively reported by Victor Raison for Le Monde, of El Cerrejón has been considered and expected. Meanwhile, coal exports to European Union countries have surged since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The volume of the convoys from the mine are currently at approximately 90,000 metric tons per day. The contract with the Colombian government expires in 2034.

Across the world, there has been growing interest and effort aimed at mitigating climate change with clean energy. The needs of distribution are often glossed over. However, Colombia has committed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20% by 2030 and to be net zero by 2050.

In this regard, much has been made about the renewable energy potential for large-scale wind and solar energy potential in La Guajira, which receives strong trade winds (average wind speeds are estimated to be 9.8 meters per second, as well as high solar radiation. As of 2022, 42 utility-scale wind farms and seven utility-scale solar farms had received approval for construction.

At first glance, the advent of wind power in Colombia may seem like an uncontroversial policy decision. Yet this clean energy effort, in fact, is an acceleration of what can accurately be called green extractivism, which embraces the same characteristics of the coal extractivism associated with the example of El Cerrejón. It refers to the limited resources, particularly access to land, needed for energy production.

Social acceptance by the Wayúu of the clean energy effort is far from complete. The legacy effects of coal extractivism have created massive resistance, distrust, and opposition to clean energy infrastructure. Their fear is a continuation of the dispossession of their communities, this time with a green veneer.

Portraits of La Guajira. Credit: @Nicolò Filippo Rosso IG: @nico.filipporosso

The violation of the Wayúu people’s fundamental rights is so extreme that even the Colombian Constitutional Court has ruled in their favor several times. In Colombia, at least formally, the 1991 Constitutional reform recognized the inherent autonomy for Indigenous groups to exercise the right to their own legislative and judicial powers within their territories. Their conditions were ruled unconstitutional in 2007. Similar rulings have been handed down by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (ICHR).

Clean Energy and Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC),  Consultas Previas

Consultas previas (prior consultations) under the United Nations Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (1957), ratified by Colombia, should have begun to matter in earnest for any project on Indigenous land. But the government of ex-president Ivan Duque (2018-2022) overrode territorial rights because the wind projects were considered a “national priority.” Similarly, the Duque administration (Presidential Order #8) mandated a “proportionality test,” which, on application, required that if after a period of three months the national government decides that the representation of the ethnic community has been insufficient, infrastructure projects may proceed. Thus, Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) as a goal of transparency for the mechanisms and effects of clean energy contracts are not available to the individuals these projects most affect.

 The  FPIC presents challenges for La Guajira. Ancestral authority (alaula) matters. The Indigenous people were traditionally semi-nomadic, living in small dispersed communities called rancherias. Communities are matrilineal with the eldest maternal uncle having significant authority. Due to the semi-dispersed clan structure (there are 30 clans) of Wayúu culture, no single leader represents the community at large. So the consultative process for any project in particular might include a dozen to several hundred communities. But it’s not as if the Wayúu are by nature uncooperative or hostile.

Members of the Wayúu community have expressed strong interest in knowing more about renewable energy. Yet with as many as 2,000 wind turbines under consideration, it’s obvious that large-scale clean energy infrastructure would dramatically transform the region’s landscape.

A reasonable assessment of the critical infrastructure of “wind rush” looks to significantly affect 288 Wayúu communities with 35 percent of ancestral lands that could be allocated for wind farms. Thus, a lack of capacity, for example, of their clearly described legal rights, to understand contracts and compensation, and to consolidate general information, as well as technological and resource constraints, that pose as challenging barriers to assessing and using crucial information.

At the most granular level, they want to know the details of benefits to their community. Will they enjoy being connected to a national energy grid? And when? What can be expected in terms of animal deaths and habitat destruction, oil leaking from turbine gear boxes, the effect of so much concrete foundation construction, the community’s access to roads.

A State of Emergency? Are There Really Any Doubts?

To ease the current humanitarian crisis in La Guajira, for several months, his efforts to pass reforms in Congress have failed.  President Gustavo Petro and all of his cabinet spent a week in late June last year to expedite the paperwork and ensure the implementation of emergency measures for an announced temporary Stare of Social and Ecological Economic Emergency because of the shortage of water, high levels of malnutrition and delays in wind projects. Behind that decision are the activities proposed by the administration to accelerate compliance with Colombia’s Constitutional Court’s decision in 2017 that ordered the government to protect the rights of the Wayúu people to water, food and health care. Petro’s initial step in June, only a year in office, was to order as many as forty tanker trucks for emergency, as well as ongoing, water delivery. Emergency solar panels with batteries for households were requisitioned. Some of these procurements have included investigations of corruption, always a challenge. The president has wanted the support of universities to send medical students to implement new mobile health teams, pending the expanded operation of medical and nursing schools at La Guajira University.

Portraits of La Guajira. Credit: @Nicolò Filippo Rosso IG: @nico.filipporosso

 For many years, the national government left to chance the fate of the Wayúu. The current Petro administration has tried to stop extractivism for the sole benefit of the alihuna by declaring in July 2023, a “state of economic, social, and environmental emergency in La Guajira.” The declaration is the reason for a one-week trip with his cabinet to La Guajira (to communities in Riohacha, Uribia, and Nazareth, Albania, Manaure and Maicao) for negotiations between the government, a dozen private energy companies and the leaders of nearly two hundred Wayúu communities. It is intended to create almost a hundred new renewable energy projects, both for wind and solar. He has said that his aim is to turn local communities into stakeholders, allowing them to participate in decision-making throughout the lifetime of a project, not just in the prior consultation stage. Significantly the plan includes the installation of fifty miles of cables to distribute electricity throughout La Guajira.

Despite the administration’s intention to settle the country’s historical debt, beginning with an emergency declaration, the Colombian Constitutional Court has blocked the state of emergency since early October, stating that the situation in La Guajira is not “sufficient” to warrant emergency intervention.

The Court did recognize the imminence of the situation, and that the upcoming malnutrition crisis is real, and that the president was not committing any errors in “interpreting” the situation. But the Court stated that it is “the constitutional responsibility of the Colombian Congress to “prevent structural problems or their aggravation.” Time will tell, but the Colombian Congress has shown no signs of endorsing any of Petro’s campaign promises to foster significant social change, including in La Guajira.