Colombian Indians Expand Territory
8/26/99
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Title: Colombian Indians expand territory
Source: Associated Press
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: August 26, 1999
An embattled Colombian Indian tribe has won a huge expansion in its
territory near the Venezuelan border, but appears to be losing its
fight to prevent a U.S. oil company from exploring near its ancestral
lands.
The 8,000-member U'wa nation on Wednesday applauded the government's
decision a day before to double the size of its forested reservation.
But the tribe says it will keep fighting an expected government ruling
to grant Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp. the rights to
conduct exploratory drilling just outside the territory now 543,000
acres.
Tribal spokesman Jose Cobaria said oil exploration and drilling in the
region would irreparably disrupt the group's quiet, semi-nomadic way
of life.
"It's not just sticking a pipe into the ground and taking out the
oil," he told The Associated Press by phone from tribal offices in
Cubura, just outside the reserve.
Oil would bring "an avalanche of people from all over the country," a
spiral in the cost of living, and the violence that plagues other oil-
producing regions in Colombia, Cobaria said.
State and foreign oil companies pay the Colombian military to station
troops near wells and pipelines _ a protection against frequent
bombings and armed extortion by leftist rebels who have gravitated to
the South American country's oil regions.
Despite the U'wa's concerns, Colombia's environment minister said he
would probably approve a license for Occidental Petroleum to build an
exploratory well just outside the U'wa reserve.
"There's nothing in Colombian law preventing it," Juan Mayr told
reporters Tuesday. Mayr, a conservationist who entered the government
last year, said the state needed to weigh the possible impact on the
U'wa against the economic development of the country as a whole.
Oil is Colombia's top legal export, but officials have said the
country will become a net petroleum importer by 2003 if it cannot
stimulate more foreign-backed exploration. Occidental has said there
may be two billion barrels of crude below the ground in the region
inhabited by the U'wa.
Colombia's constitution grants the country's 80 tribes vast authority
over natural resource management on hundreds of legally recognized
reservations.
However, Mayr said, the proposed exploratory well lies "a few
kilometers" outside of the expanded U'wa reserve.
For the Indian group that's close enough to spell disaster.
In a letter to President Andres Pastrana, the U'wa said it would not
permit any exploration or drilling "within or outside the territory."
The U'wa gained worldwide attention in 1997 by threatening mass
suicide to prevent an earlier Occidental petition to drill on its
reserve.
At the time, the U'wa said they believed oil to be "the blood of
mother earth," and drilling synonymous with the destruction of their
culture.
Stung by the bad publicity, the company revised its plans, and late
last year requested a government license to move its proposed well
just outside the reserve.
Copyright 1999, Associated Press, All Rights Reserved