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Local Environment: The International
Journal of Justice and Sustainability
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Injustice and organisation in Anchicayá,
Colombia: an environmental legal case
in a hydropower watershed
Marcela Velascoa
a Department of Political Science, Colorado State University, Fort
Collins, CO, USA
Published online: 26 Feb 2015.
To cite this article: Marcela Velasco (2015): Injustice and organisation in Anchicayá, Colombia: an
environmental legal case in a hydropower watershed, Local Environment: The International Journal
of Justice and Sustainability, DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2015.1015973
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2015.1015973
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Injustice and organisation in Anchicaya
´, Colombia: an
environmental legal case in a hydropower watershed
Marcela Velasco∗
Department of Political Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
(Received 21 February 2014; accepted 27 January 2015)
The paper looks at Colombia’s first major environmental justice legal case involving a
riparian Afro-Colombian community and the Pacific Energy Company (EPSA).
Riverine Afro-Colombian communities gained political recognition as a culturally
distinct group largely based on their conservation practices in riparian environments.
The work contrasts the complexities of the case with the vulnerable reality of the
people of Anchicaya
´who largely live in conditions of poverty, violence and political
isolation. It also describes the institutions that frame watershed management, the
ethnic rights to collective land and self-governance and the property rights of energy
companies in the backdrop of decentralisation reforms that clarified different types of
property rights and refounded Colombia as a multicultural nation. The legal suit,
however, demonstrates that the government failed to offer equal protection to
collective versus private cultural and socio-economic uses of land and water in order
to protect energy investments. The Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence ultimately
privileged technical and legal know-how and overlooked the limits community
intermediaries face offering similar evidence. By doing so, the court not only
disregarded the constitutional rights of Afro-Colombians, but it also failed to mitigate
a socio-environmental conflict.
Keywords: hydroelectricity; environmental justice; ethno-political rights; Afro-
Colombians; decentralisation; water justice
Introduction
On 22 June 2001, the Pacific Energy Company (EPSA) opened gates at the Anchicaya
´dam
evacuating within 10 days an estimated 500,000 m
3
of sediment into the Anchicaya
´River
that polluted water and ruined crops and fish populations. The Anchicaya
´River begins its
course in the mountains of the Farallones National Park near the City of Cali and ends in the
Pacific Ocean, flowing through tropical rainforests and mangroves. The river is located in
the rural area of Buenaventura (Valle del Cauca Department) in Colombia’s Pacific littoral,
a biodiversity hotspot and a sociopolitically marginalised region (see map Figure 1). Bue-
naventura is the country’s main port in the Pacific and the Anchicaya
´River has supplied
energy to adjacent urban industrial centres since the 1960s. Paramilitary, drug-trafficking
and guerrilla territorial wars to control local resources have also turned Buenaventura
into one of Colombia’s most violent regions.
#2015 Taylor & Francis
∗Email: marcela.velasco@colostate.edu
Local Environment, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2015.1015973
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After the June incident, flooding and sedimentation compromised vital food supplies,
increased water-borne diseases and reduced mobility along the river. Soon after, a yet unre-
solved legal case began to unfold. EPSA has denied wrongdoing and downplayed its
responsibilities while government authorities continuously delay legal compensation for
the damages. Meanwhile, affected communities struggle to offer technical evidence
proving a direct cause between specific and quantifiable economic damages and EPSA’s
actions, giving the courts and the company legal arguments to challenge environmental
harms claims. Anchicaguen˜os are descendants of enslaved Africans whose land rights
were denied until the 1990s. As other black communities across the littoral, they joined
the 1980s social movement for ethnic-territorial rights that helped reconstruct a common
Afro-Colombian culture. When Colombia’s 1991 Constitution recognised their rights, as
well as the collective rights of other ethnic minorities to land and self-government, it
refounded Colombia as a multicultural country. At this point, the national government del-
egated many responsibilities to ethnic organisations (Pardo and A
´lvarez 2001) and formally
enabled considerable levels of local action to hold governments and private companies
accountable on development projects. Decentralised natural resource management
reforms also anticipated high levels of participation. However, as in Anchicaya
´, most
Figure 1. Anchicaya
´River, Buenaventura (Valle del Cauca), Colombia. Map created by Kristian
Rubiano Caldero
´n.
2M. Velasco
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ethnic authorities are finding it difficult to control development projects since their organ-
isations and traditional livelihoods were weakened by extractivism and violent uprooting.
My analysis builds on the idea that decentralisation has the potential to address socio-
environmental justice by including more people in the decision-making process (Agyeman
2005, Wolford 2008, Rantala and Lyimo 2011), clarifying collective property rights and
recognising ethnic authorities. This is, however, undermined by the intermediation strat-
egies of more powerful or better organised actors (Baviskar 2004,Li2007, Benjamin
2008) and the government’s indifference to multicultural forms of political and legal organ-
isation. Expanding on this, my work finds that decentralisation reforms failed to offer equal
protection to collective versus private sociocultural and economic uses of land and water.
This is particularly evident in the way the Constitutional Court undermined the socio-
environmental rights of anchicaguen˜os. The court’s environmental jurisprudence gave pre-
ferential treatment to the company’s rights to due process and sidestepped the collective
legal and political rights of a historically marginalised community whose intermediaries
could not reasonably offer the technical and scientific evidence favoured by the courts.
Decentralisation, water and environmental justice
Decentralisation formally increased community participation in resource management
(Solanes and Jouralev 2006) and potentiated the involvement of different stakeholders
and institutions in the planning, design and execution of water projects (Swallow et al.
2006, Silva 2011). Decentralisation in Colombia sanctioned new actors and changed
local power dynamics, prompting novel forms of inter-institutional coordination (cf. Sar-
miento 1998). In many municipalities the reforms led to innovative governance and
increased citizen satisfaction with the administration of local affairs. But in some weak
institutional settings, they facilitated armed clientelism, violent rent-seeking (Eaton 2006)
and “violent democratisation” where leftists who gained control of local administrations
faced right-wing paramilitary violence informally sanctioned by state elites (Carroll 2011).
Decentralised politics also introduced legal pluralism – or the coexistence of multiple
legal systems, such as the customary norms of cultural minorities and the statutory laws of
the cultural majority – to accommodate different cultural patterns, social institutions and
legal systems in delimited ancestral territories (Schilling-Vacaflor and Kuppe 2012). Disen-
franchised Afro-Colombian communities from the Pacific Coast had supported a process of
“ethnicisation” to claim cultural distinctiveness and gain political recognition as an ethnic
group in order to safeguard ancestral lands and local livelihoods as development projects
advanced into their traditional lands (Restrepo 2002). They demonstrated that in this fron-
tier region, Afro-Colombian traditional knowledge and practices had led to conservation,
and to the formation of a particular cultural identity shaped by spatial relations to riparian
environments (Hoffman 2000, Almario 2002, Oslender 2002). Afro-Colombian territorial
claims were thus formalised creating Black Community Councils that, among other func-
tions, serve as “planning units” in watershed management (Law 70 of 1993). Legal plural-
ism, however, was from the start undermined by ineffective legal mechanisms and by
societal intolerance for normative diversity (cf. Van Cott 2000).
Given the centrality of water ecosystems for black ethno-territorial rights, water man-
agement and, in the case of Anchicaya
´, energy reforms also shaped local environmental
governance. Colombia’s ethnic rights, as well as water and energy policies follow inter-
national recommendations on Free, Prior and Informed Consultation (FPIC) of ethnic
groups, Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and electricity deregulation.
They also emphasise the clarification of property regimes and delimitation of the rights
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and responsibilities of all stakeholders. FPIC and IWRM principles recommend consider-
able levels of local action to hold the parties involved in development projects accountable.
In practice, however, the widespread exclusion of small water users and ethnic min-
orities has undermined the in-built environmental and social justice objectives of water
sector reforms (Sa
´nchez-Triana et al. 2006, Solanes and Jouravlev 2006). Corruption and
special interest capture of the state also challenge the democratisation of water management
(Solanes and Jouravlev 2006). Colombia’s 2010 “National Policy for the Integral Manage-
ment of Water Resources” tackled some of these issues by following IWRM principles that
encourage participation across different territorial and governance levels to procure growth
under conditions of social justice (Bauer 2005). The policy seeks to improve water govern-
ability by strengthening environmental institutions and compelling all water users to partici-
pate in decision-making, but favours technical and economic instruments to solve water
problems (Viceministerio de Ambiente 2010). In other words, it generally overlooks the
complex sociopolitical and cultural issues surrounding water governance.
Optimal watershed management is undermined by low levels of participation by weaker
stakeholders who are unable to negotiate their rights (Swallow et al.2006). This is worse of
a problem in electricity-generating watersheds, which in Colombia blatantly undermines
the interests of affected communities and vulnerable ethnic groups (Sa
´nchez-Triana et al.
2006). As in other parts of the developing world, source communities bear most of the
costs of ecological degradation, while profits are exported (Finley-Brook and Thomas
2011, p. 864). In Antioquia for instance, after local organisations successfully influenced
public policy in their favour, local activists were targeted by violent groups (Quintero
2007). In Co
´rdoba, the Urra
´Hydroelectric project violated the rights of the Embera
´
Katı
´o indigenous community, demonstrating that the FPIC framework failed to check
repressive local powers (Durango 2008).
In Colombia as in other Latin American countries, water has been at the centre of socio-
environmental conflicts. Poor and middle-class households facing higher water prices have
challenged privatisation and supported regime change in Bolivia (Mamani 2003, Dangl
2007), pushed for institutional reforms to treat access to water as a basic human right in
Uruguay and other countries (Taks 2008) and contested hydroelectricity development in
Chile and Brazil (Blaser et al. 2004, Carruthers 2008) and mining projects threatening
water for human and agricultural use. Anchicaya
´falls within the scope of such water
justice movements.
Though Latin America’s growing grass-roots environmentalism is defined in terms of
environmental conflict (cf. Reboratti 2008), it does address similar issues as those raised
by the environmental justice paradigm. This paradigm took shape in the USA in the
1980s when activists and scholars noted that minority communities suffer more exposure
to toxicity and are less likely to receive equal environmental protection (United Church
of Christ 1987, Agyeman 2005). Studies from other parts of the world also find unequal
spatial distributions of contamination that burden marginalised communities and find that
wealthier groups are either protected from environmental hazards or have the means to
look after their interests (cf. Baabereyir et al. 2012).
Studies on Mexico, for example, demonstrate that in many places rich and poor live in
adjacent spaces and are equally exposed to certain types of pollution; however, poorer com-
munities fail to access protective services and suffer the worst consequences (Stevens et al.
2008, Grineski et al. 2012). Throughout Latin America this sort of inequality became more
pronounced after neo-liberal structural adjustment policies widened the gap between rich
and poor (Carruthers 2008). Since environmental injustices overlap with other forms of
exclusion, activists would be remiss to frame environmental claims solely as environmental
4M. Velasco
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justice issues. Instead, they interpret environmental injustices as problems of the “maldis-
tribution of the negative effects arising from the use of the environment” (Reboratti 2008,
p. 102).
Environmental legal procedures in the region have also failed to produce effective
results, and rather tend to involve ordinary people in complex, corrupt or labyrinthine
cases (cf. Dı
´ez and Rodrı
´guez 2008, Reboratti 2008). Auyero and Swistun (2009) offer evi-
dence of delays and interruptions in the adjudication of environmental conflict in an Argen-
tine shantytown. Government, legal, business and health experts generate hundreds of
pages of difficult-to-decipher legal or scientific jargon, while community advocates
barely manage to organise. Finally, Argentina’s political and economic transitions from
authoritarianism to democracy, and from state-led to market economies compounded
these problems. In the transition, political authority and property ownership had changed
making it difficult to isolate culpable parties.
Activists thus cope with changing political systems that bring new groups into power
and that are characterised by policy discontinuity or institutions that are not fully developed.
In Mexico, for example, urbanisation and industrialisation did not follow a structured logic,
making it difficult to prove that a specific group was targeted by the state (Dı
´ez and
Rodrı
´guez 2008). On the other hand, though Latin American governments enhanced parti-
cipatory instruments, revamped environmental agencies and drafted more environmental
rights into laws, they have failed to implement the new laws and generally act to block acti-
vism (Hochstetler 2012). Environmental activism must adapt then to deep-rooted inequality
and to the limitations of newly democratic political systems. Consequently, activists more
typically address ecological problems by using an environmental conflict discourse that
vindicates and constructs environmental rights at the same time (Reboratti 2008), and
mix both legal and informal actions to address people’s rights.
In contrast to other South American nations, Colombia has a longer democratic tra-
dition, interrupted by moderate military rule from 1953 to 1957. Its main challenge has
been the effects of guerrilla and later, paramilitary violence. Guerrillas emerged in the
1960s as a political alternative to oligarchic rule, while paramilitaries formed in the
1980s to provide protection to landowners and, arguably, to cover for the state’s incapacity
to contain subversion (Romero 2000). This low-intensity conflict escalated into a centrifu-
gal internal war with devastating effects on human and economic rights, especially of vul-
nerable ethnic groups. The political reforms of the 1990s in large part tried to establish
institutional mechanisms to pacify Colombian politics and legitimise the state.
So far this paper has suggested that decentralisation democratised decision-making by
revamping the role of local authorities and enabling new political actors, such as the Afro-
Colombian Community Councils. Decentralisation formally improved participatory mech-
anisms in environmental decision-making, and increased the government’s responsibilities
in the prevention and mitigation of environmental damages as well as indemnification of
affected communities (Gu
¨iza 2011). However, to advance their interests, newly enabled
local authorities must negotiate overlapping laws and jurisdictions in a context character-
ised by weak institutionalisation of decentralised, democratic politics and government
disregard of the multicultural authorities.
Methodology
I contacted people from Anchicaya
´in 2007 when I participated as an observer in meetings
of Mesa Manglar, a network formed in 2003 by black and indigenous leaders from Colom-
bia’s Pacific Coast who meet to evaluate the degradation of mangrove ecosystems and
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territories (Mesa Manglar 2008). By 2010 I had participated in three Mesa Manglar meet-
ings in Buenaventura where I discussed with anchicaguen˜os events connected to EPSA.
Here I met Silvano Caicedo a prominent leader and a member of the Organization of
Blacks United for the Interests and Defense of the Anchicaya
´River (ONUIRA) and of
the Greater Council of the Anchicaya
´River.
In 2011, with the help of Caicedo and Jorge Segura, also from ONUIRA and the Greater
Council, I visited the communities. Travelling to Anchicaya
´is not easy for an outsider.
First, all travel to Anchicaya
´is by water and there is no regular transportation. Second,
there are few places to stay as a visitor. Finally, the region is frequented by illegally
armed groups. Unless one is part of a larger commission, travel to the villages is difficult
and possibly dangerous.
I visited seaside and river communities for four days in July 2011 with Silvano Caicedo
who helped me conduct two meetings with local leaders and residents. The first meeting
took place in the community of Amazonas with about 40 people, mostly women residents
and some village leaders (Figure 2). This meeting accommodated people from small ripar-
ian villages along the lower end of the river. The largest delegation of 20 people came from
Brasitos and Amazonas. There were also representatives from Santa Ba
´rbara, Calle Larga,
Humanes Rı
´o and Taparal. At this meeting we offered lunch and asked open-ended ques-
tions on local organisation, territory, environment and natural resources. People spoke
mostly about desperate conditions in the areas of health, education and employment, as
well as personal and collective insecurity given the presence of violent groups.
The second meeting took place in Humanes Mar, a larger community near mangroves
and the ocean (Figure 3). The same open-ended questions were asked and participants
offered comments on the challenges of uniting all the communities. In both meetings
people asked Mr. Caicedo to update them on the EPSA case. We also visited leaders in
three additional villages and held informal conversations as they carried on with regular
activities. One such visit was to the village of San Jose
´, an abandoned town after a
combat between Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas, and govern-
ment armed forces displaced most residents in 2010. To respect their privacy I have kept
most people’s comments anonymous.
I also spent three days in Buenaventura interviewing local government officials in the
Planning Department, the Municipal Unit for Agricultural Technical Assistance (UMATA)
and the Autonomous Corporation of the Cauca Valley (CVC). In Cali, I held conversations
with Germa
´n Ospina, Anchicaya
´’s lawyer, and with faculty at the Pontificia Universidad
Javeriana’s Intercultural Studies Center. Information for this paper comes from field
visits; interviews inside and outside the community; government documents from the Min-
istry of the Environment, the municipality of Buenaventura and the CVC; and my field
notes.
Development and property regimes in Anchicaya
´
Landscape changes in Anchicaya
´began in 1925 with the construction of the Simo
´n Bolı
´var
road that connected Cali to the port of Buenaventura and opened the way for deforestation
and the expansion of the agricultural frontier. However, the greatest environmental impact
came with the energy projects that supported growth in the Cauca River Valley. The Upper
Anchicaya
´Hydroelectric dam became operational in 1974, and during its construction,
material thrown into the river accumulated in the Lower Anchicaya
´dam which was later
dredged causing soil and water contamination (Sule
´2006).
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Figure 2. Meeting in Amazonas, Anchicaya
´River, Buenaventura (Colombia).
Figure 3. Men returning from work in the evening, Humanes Mar, Anchicaya
´River, Buenaventura
(Colombia).
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The Anchicaya
´River Hydroelectric Central (CHIDRAL) was created in 1950 as a com-
mercial company of limited liability whose main shareholders were the national govern-
ment with 51%, the Department of Valle del Cauca with 23% and the City of Cali with
26% of the shares (IBRD 1950). Between 1950 and 1955, the World Bank made two
loans to CHIDRAL to build a hydroelectric plant in Anchicaya
´to supply power to Cali
and Yumbo, whose industrial expansion was limited by energy scarcity (IBRD 1950,
1955). The project changed the river’s natural course and life cycles and intensified
floods which used to occur every 10 – 12 years, and then began twice a year. By the
1960s, industrialisation and population growth in Cali, Palmira and Yumbo, and the devel-
opment of the port of Buenaventura, intensified the energy demand. The World Bank
approved more loans in 1963 to expand CHIDRAL’s coverage and to finance Calima II,
Yumbo’s thermoelectric and technical studies for the construction of the Salvajina dam
(IBRD 1963).
CHIDRAL’s board was composed of five members appointed by the shareholders and
three by the directors of the CVC. The CVC is Colombia’s oldest Autonomous Corporation
(CAR) created in 1954 to stimulate economic development. At this time, the CVC’s board
of directors consisted of seven members: the Minister of Economy and Development, the
governors of the Cauca and Valle del Cauca Departments and four “prominent residents”,
two of whom were appointed by Colombia’s President and two by business organisations
and landowners (IBRD 1963, p. 2). The board now includes 10 representatives: two from
the national government; two each from the regional business community, non-governmen-
tal organisations and mayors; and one each from Afro-Colombian and indigenous
communities.
The 1990s market reforms of hydroelectricity deregulated the sector and established a
bid-based electricity wholesale market (Larsen et al. 2004). The reforms separated regulat-
ory from generation services by privatising the production and delivery of electric energy,
and safeguarding the property rights of large investors (Solanes and Jouravlev 2006). Elec-
tricity generation, transmission and distribution services were unbundled, and independent
regulatory institutions were created. This required restructuring the CARs which oversaw
watershed management as well as energy generation and transmission (Blackman et al.
2006). The market reforms turned the CARs into regional environmental authorities, and
passed over commercial and transmission services to private companies. Companies with
a generation potential above 10,000 kW were set to transfer 3% of their gross sales to
CARs and another 3% to municipalities where watersheds sustain hydroelectricity projects.
The funds are allocated to basic sanitation and environmental protection.
In the 1990s, CHIDRAL was privatised and the CVC restructured. The CVC took on
the role of regional environmental regulator, and the generation, transmission and distri-
bution of electricity was transferred to EPSA, which was created in 1995 (Celeita 2004,
p. 97). EPSA was privatised in 1997 by first auctioning a 57% stake to USA and Venezuelan
consortium, and in 2000 the multinational Unio
´n Fenosa purchased 64% of the company. In
2009 Unio
´n Fenosa sold 100% of its shares to Colombia’s Investment Company which
belongs to the Antioquen˜o Business Group. Currently, EPSA’s main shareholders are
Colener with 50% of shares, Cali’s Public Utility Company (19%), the CVC (16%) and
Grupo Argos (12%).
Justice and legal obfuscation in the case against EPSA
The suit against EPSA has been identified as Colombia’s first important environmental
justice case with possible repercussions in other regions where communities are contesting
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the environmental impacts of development (Semana 2012). This section offers some details
of the convoluted case which in 2012 ended in favour of the company. Litigation involved
different local, regional and national jurisdictions. EPSA first faced environmental charges
from regulatory institutions that it either failed to observe or chose to contest. Anchicague-
n˜os were then compelled to design their own legal strategies against EPSA, the CVC and
the Ministry of the Environment.
As suggested by the Office of the Ombudsman, lack of diligence is largely to blame for
the unfavourable result:
[The Ministry’s resolutions] in some occasions imposed obligations on the company, in others
modified them and yet in others revoked them altogether. Additionally, when looking at the
time of expedition between one administrative act and another, the Ministry’s decision-
making did not conform to the principles governing administrative functions, in particular
those relating to speed and efficiency. (Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2007)
Such vicissitudes, however, reveal more than a lack of due diligence and rather highlight the
legal machinations that overwhelmed ordinary people’s rights to a safe environment.
In 2001, reservoir capacity in the dam was reduced by 40% as a result of the accumu-
lation of 2.8 million m
3
of sediment (Lo
´pez 2012), so the company opened floodgates to
evacuate the sediment, dumping in a matter of days 500,000 m
3
of sediment that caused
water pollution, degradation of plant and wildlife and economic devastation to about
3000 people (Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2005). In September 2001, EPSA faced charges for
violating national environmental laws. The company was blamed for keeping inadequate
infrastructure to maintain the dam and failing to follow technical recommendations on
the management of sedimentation (Celeita 2004).
Surprisingly, an environmental assessment study of the damages was only done in 2004
by the Valle del Cauca’s Fish and Agriculture Division (Corte Constitucional. Repu
´blica de
Colombia 2012). The two-year distance between the incident and the technical proofs was
later used by the Constitutional Court to judge in favour of EPSA on grounds that due
process was not followed. The 2004 environmental assessment report found, among
other things, levels of 999 nephelometric turbidity units (NTU), well above the 5 NTU
maximum allowed by law in rivers that supply drinking water (Celeita 2004). It also regis-
tered a decrease in 14 fish species, as well as crop loss resulting from mud flooding into
agricultural areas and blocking drainage systems (Celeita 2004).
In 2001, the Ministry of the Environment initiated the case with a punitive investigation
(Resolution 809 of 2001) against EPSA and demanded that the company prepare preventive
measures, which EPSA declined to execute (Ministerio de Ambiente, Vivienda, y Desar-
rollo Territorial 2004). A new resolution by the Ministry (No. 0556 of 2002) imposed a
fine on EPSA and ordered it to make compensatory measures including an Environmental
Management Plan, a census of the affected population, and food replacement, fishery and
agricultural programmes. But EPSA appealed and two new Ministry resolutions revoked
the food replacement programme (Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2007).
A 2004 tutela – a writ that demands the effective protection of basic rights – ruling
ordered the State Council’s Board of Administrative Litigation to force EPSA to offer a
food replacement programme (Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2007). Another resolution mandated
EPSA to comply with the fish restocking programmes and yet another obliged EPSA to
deliver bimonthly remittances of roughly US$20 (48,000 pesos) of non-perishable products
for a year to each family. But an additional resolution fully reversed food remittances after
EPSA alleged before a Peace and Reconciliation Judge in Buenaventura that it had
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delivered for a year 9614 kg of fish which were not properly distributed by Community
Councils (Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2007).
In 2002 communities took legal action but were divided in their efforts. The villages
in the middle and lower course of the river brought a class action suit against EPSA, the
Ministry of Environment and the CVC. Meanwhile, the villages of Humanes and
Taparal – which had suffered the worst environmental damages – filed a tutela
against the Ministry of Environment to stop it from revoking food substitution and tech-
nical assistance programmes (Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2007). Meanwhile, an attorney
representing the communities in Buenaventura’s Corregimiento 8 (eighth district)
brought a criminal prosecution against EPSA. This lawyer was allegedly connected to
clientelistic networks in the area. According to Germa
´n Ospina, the lawyer for the
Greater Council of the Anchicaya
´River, a criminal prosecution is an unfeasible alterna-
tive because it is difficult to identify and blame individual company members for the
environmental disaster (interview, Cali 2011). He was also baffled by the Corregimien-
to’s efforts to invalidate the class action suit filed by the other villages. To Ospina, this
attorney’s manoeuvres were designed to divide people. In 2008 the State Council
annulled the criminal prosecution and decided that the class action suit should cover
all Anchicaya
´communities.
In a positive turn, a 2009 court ruling in Buenaventura’s First Administrative Court
found EPSA and the CVC culpable for environmental damages. Their sentence was con-
firmed by the Administrative Tribunal of the Valle del Cauca Department, which also
decided that individually assessed damages should now make part of a common fund to
be distributed among all Anchicaya
´communities, including those that had not participated
in the class action suit. The Superior Tribunal on its part ordered CVC and EPSA to pay 150
billion pesos (roughly US$83 million) for causing the environmental disaster. EPSA had to
cover 80% of this, but failed to pay. The Community Council’s attorney found this inexcu-
sable because when Unio
´n Fenosa sold its share of the company to the Grupo Antioquen˜o,
they “made provisions to pay for environmental damages”.
EPSA has denied wrongdoing, noting that it did not release the amount of sediment
claimed in the reports and that the so-called environmental disaster was simply an incident
that caused “water turbidity and fish mortality” (Marı
´n2011). This is a common line of
argument in environmental justice cases where proving causality between a particular
event and environmental well-being is difficult considering the lack of due diligence and
independent scientific valuation (cf. Bryant 1995). EPSA also alleges that it carried out a
lawful action to maintain the dam following management plans developed by the CVC
and that the river’s main function is to generate energy (Marı
´n2011), suggesting that
environmental considerations in this case are secondary. EPSA tried to overthrow the
whole process by filing a tutela in the Council of State arguing evidentiary errors, but
the council denied the suit. However, a 2012 Constitutional Court judgement revoked
the group action, annulled the technical reports of environmental damages gathered
earlier and gave the Valle del Cauca’s Administrative Tribunal 15 business days to
gather new proofs on the environmental damages through an independent body with
proven scientific and technical expertise (Corte Constitucional. Repu
´blica de Colombia
2012). The court judged in favour of the company and left the communities with no
further legal recourse. In a 2012 Management Report to shareholders, Colener (EPSA’s
main shareholder) reports that given the courts provision, it has “decided to keep under
its financial statements the value of the liability recognised in 2009, not as an account
payable but as a long-term estimated liability on account of provisions” (Celsia 2012,
p. 65). Since the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence evidently eluded the constitutional
10 M. Velasco
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rights of an at-risk cultural minority, the case might probably be taken to the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights.
Anchicaguen˜os or the objects of litigation
Poverty and violence, and denial of justice, compound the environmental burdens facing
anchicaguen˜os. Like the rest of the population of the Colombian Pacific, people in Anchi-
caya
´are among the poorest in the country. In the rural area of Buenaventura, 47% of the
population have unmet basic needs, including sanitation, social services and utilities
(DANE 2005). In comparison, in 2012, about 30% of Colombia’s 46 million people had
unmet basic needs (DANE 2012).
1
Anchicaya
´’s traditional black communities lacked
clear titles to land until the 1990s and were normally represented through clientelistic or
kinship networks. Prior to Law 70 of 1993, no legislation recognised the collective land
rights of traditional Afro-Colombian communities in the Pacific Coast, who could only
claim property as peasants through land reform measures (i.e. Law 135 of 1961) that
offered individual titles and insertion into markets. This could mean the cultural break-
up of ancestral territories if people fell into debt or sold their land. In response, an Afro-
Colombian movement in defence of land, identity and culture emerged in the 1980s.
The watershed is currently settled by approximately 6000 people who live in 19 villages
as shown in Figure 4 drawn by Jorge Segura from ONUIRA. He sketched this map for me
before we travelled to the river to give me a sense of the communities’ location. Segura
divided the communities, as people in the region do, between those who live in the
upper zone (zona alta or upriver), middle zone (zona media or in the middle part of the
river) and coastal zone (zona costera or in the mangroves and the bay). Figure 1 only
shows the main communities, so the hand-drawn map complements the formal map.
With Law 70/1993 the 19 villages obtained collective titles to 59,024 ha of government-
defined “vacant or barren lands” (baldı
´os) and villages spanning the River organised in nine
Community Councils (see Table 1). Per law, Community Councils in black territories
oversee collective property and natural resources, divide land internally, choose legal repre-
sentatives and settle conflicts that may be solved by the community’s traditional authorities.
Colombian law also allows for special Mining Zones for traditional black communities
given the importance of gold panning for them. The Minister of Mines and Energy has
granted collective mining concessions in the Anchicaya
´villages of San Marcos and
Guaimı
´a.
2
Collective land rights are nevertheless limited by national government claims
to subsoil rights for hydrocarbon or mining concessions. Currently, the National Hydrocar-
bons Agency has covered parts of Anchicaya
´as blocks of land available for prospecting.
3
River communities are represented by ONUIRA, the Community Councils, village com-
mittees (comite
´sveredales), the Council of Elders – a traditional authority with one or two
representatives from each village – and justices of the peace who settle problems between
families. It is important to note that Community Councils do not receive decentralised fiscal
resources to fund activities. The local committees take care of most difficulties in the commu-
nities and only resort to other instances “when things get out of hand”. According to meeting
participants, the most important grass roots organisational process began when the Committee
to Defend the Anchicaya
´River and ONUIRAwere formed in 1984 to unite people and rep-
resent their ethno-cultural rights. Anchicaya
´joined the Afro-Colombian leader Carlos
Rosero in the process that eventually produced Law 70, participated in the Centro de Estudios
Cimarro
´nand took part in protests to pressure the national government into passing Law 70.
ONUIRA has become Anchicaya
´’s main “political body” by which Caicedo means that
it serves to represent Anchicaya
´as a collectivity, carry out grass-roots political work,
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support traditional organisations and develop networks. ONUIRA is behind the consolida-
tion of the Greater Council of the Anchicaya
´River to unify most of the villages in the river.
To this end, customary laws, governance plans and internal rules are negotiated in local
assemblies made up of elders, women and different community leaders. ONUIRA is
Figure 4. Anchicaya
´River communities as drawn by Jorge Segura (July 2011).
12 M. Velasco
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aligned with the Black Community Process (PCN) – Colombia’s most important black
social movement – and its Palenque el Congal in Buenaventura.
At the time of my visit, Corregimiento 8 villages in the upper part of the river had not
joined ONUIRA’s unity process, and remain under the umbrella of traditional clientelistic
networks operating from Buenaventura. They are politically aligned with the Federation of
Community Councils of the Cauca Valley which formed as a pro-government organisation
claiming representation of black communities in order to contest the political influence of
the PCN. According to Jose
´Santos, activist and sociologist for the PCN, and Efraı
´n Jara-
millo, Director of the Colectivo Jenzera
´, the PCN is more committed to grass-roots local
organising and the ethno-territorial autonomy of its base communities (personal communi-
cation 2010). Therefore, opposition by Corregimiento 8 communities to a unified political
process was weakening Anchicaya
´as a whole.
As described previously, Anchicaya
´was divided in the suit against EPSA – Corregi-
miento 8 villages filed a criminal complaint, while the others filed a class action suit. Iro-
nically, the legal case failed to compensate environmental damages, but contributed to
local divisions. For example, the 2009 administrative decision that pooled the total sum
of individual damages assessed by communities in the class action suit also benefited Cor-
regimiento 8 communities, and led to anger and frustration. As ONUIRA’s lawyer argued,
this “is generating tensions in the communities as people who followed the class action suit
are asking that the original expertise assessment be respected and people in the road com-
munities now feel that they also have rights to that money”.
Everyday lives and worries in Anchicaya
´
Most villages in Anchicaya
´live isolated from Buenaventura, the closest urban centre.
Transportation to the city is scarce and expensive. Anchicaya
´generally lacks electricity
Table 1. Anchicaya
´River Community Councils.
Name Resolution Hectares Settlements Families Population
Agua Clara 1173, July 2002 12,909.73 1 45 160
Bracitos y Amazonas 01175, July 2002 4029.45 2 72 322
Guaimı
´a 2198, March 2002 1424.44 1 44 171
Limones 1178, July 2002 1308.06 1 28 98
Llano Bajo, San Pedro,
Tatabro, and Arivı
´;
Corregimiento No. 8
1119, May 2001 5014.22 4 68 305
Sabaletas 2065, Nov 2002 12,238.09 1 108 485
San Marcos 2066, Nov 2002 3607.33 1 56 241
Taparal and Humanes Mar 1084, April 1998 1720.17 1 52 221
Greater Council of the
Anchicaya
´River
(covering El Coco, El
Llano, Santa Ba
´rbara, San
Jose
´, Calle Larga, las
Palmas and Humanes
Rı
´o)
2197, Dec 2002 16,773.2 7 211 930
Total (Incoder 2003) 59,024.69 19 684 2933
Source: Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria (2003). According to the community and the Office of the
Ombudsmans, there are 6000 people in Anchicaya
´.
Local Environment 13
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and potable water (Figure 5). Communities closer to the mangroves and waters of the
Pacific Ocean depend on fishing, shellfish collection and logging of mangle trees.
Upriver, people fish, farm, cut wood and sell chontaduro (Bactris gasipaes). Other activities
include artisanal gold mining (barequeo), education and health services. Fishing at sea is
typically done by groups of partners, and agriculture is done in collaboration in mingas
or work teams. Families also share labour in what is known as “changed hands” (mano cam-
biada) to build or maintain homes. Several people during my visit stated that these practices
helped them preserve the environment and ensure enough food.
ONUIRA leaders agreed that such activities build social networks and are at the core of
black ethnic identity, and worry about the rapid and violent economic transition affecting
everyday livelihoods. Other events also play a part in undermining local livelihoods. Vio-
lence in the City of Buenaventura, explained by armed territorial control of strategic legal
and illegal resources in the port (Molano 2007), is spilling into rural areas of the municipal-
ity. Places such as Anchicaya
´experience militarisation and the influx of illegally armed
groups seeking hideouts and alternative routes. Unregulated gold mining in Anchicaya
´’s
upper course is contaminating water (El Paı
´s2010), while local authorities egregiously
fail to apply environmental regulations in violation of Afro-Colombian territorial rights
(PCN 2011). Finally, coca was introduced in some parts of Anchicaya
´, but as explained
by a young male activist in ONUIRA “we reached out to those people and made them
leave” without the help of regular law enforcement authorities.
4
In our group meetings, a few female leaders voiced concern about the ill state of health,
education and security, all made worse by “discrimination against black communities”, and
the “total abandonment in which we live”. They suspect that some diseases are due to pol-
lution from mining and river sedimentation, and believe that the government must do more
Figure 5. Example of riparian settlements, Anchicaya
´River, Buenaventura (Colombia).
14 M. Velasco
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to address these issues by increasing its civilian presence. A woman village leader did state
that they were covered by the Identification System of Potential Beneficiaries of Social Pro-
grams (SISBEN), a government social service that offers health, housing or education sub-
sidies to some of the poorest Colombians. But this programme “was not doing enough”.
She also affirmed that “the government must send something, where one goes one only
sees military personnel and armed groups”. Silvano Caicedo explained that the Navy and
Coast Guard are setting difficult new standards for people to comply with, like the use
of life vests that not everyone can afford (Figure 6). And as an ONUIRA activist explained,
the security controls were used to reprimand people and “accuse us of supplying the guer-
rillas” when carrying gasoline or food.
So Anchicaya
´went from being “abandoned by the state” to only facing its repressive
side. As a Community Council member explained, both guerrillas and government
armed forces “come here, abuse women, take shelter in churches and schools, do not
abide by civil authority rules in the communities and violate the rights of civilians”. In
2011 the FARC caused three mass displacements in the river, and at the time of our
visit, the community of San Jose
´, a village with good infrastructure for community,
health and education centres, was almost completely abandoned. According to a 2011
press release signed by leaders of nearby rivers on the “Current Situation in Rural Buena-
ventura”, in their bid for territorial control, armed groups behind illegal mining are also
forcing displacements in Anchicaya
´.
Faced with this situation, many want to move to Buenaventura, but according to one
woman from the village of Amazonas “there is too much suffering there”. They generally
Figure 6. Transportation in the Anchicaya
´River, Buenaventura (Colombia).
Local Environment 15
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see an uncertain future for young people and consider young men at high risk of forceful
recruitment. A few parents at the meeting agreed that an incentive to leave was finding a
better education for their children, to which an ONUIRA leader replied that a reason to
stay is “to strengthen our organisation and achieve unity” and “improve education to suit
the reality of our territory”. Some work towards that end has been achieved; for
example, the village of Humanes Mar is building high school education facilities.
However, organisation is a difficult task, but as Silvano Caicedo explains “we have a
long history of active community participation through our organisational expressions,
despite all the racism and genocide in which we live, coming from the state and now
from the abuse of multinationals”.
ONUIRA; the PCN; the Community Councils of Taparal, Humanes, Brasito and Ama-
zonas; Punta Soldado; and the Greater Council of the Anchicaya
´River are organising socio-
environmental campaigns to help their own local governance institutions. The Campan˜a
Renacer or the Rebirth Campaign “from the entrails of the River to protect our territory”
insists on a “civic and peaceful vision to build democratic solutions worthy of the
country that we want and deserve”. This campaign calls for an environmental identity
and Afro-Colombian pride among the people of the river. The campaign endorses edu-
cational campaigns, and assertive acts to observe EPSA’s “environmental crime” and
denounce institutional negligence. Among the most important symbolic acts are “balsadas”
or boat tours along the River supported by other regional organisations to raise awareness
about environmental rights and damages.
5
They are also demanding the right of FPIC following International Labour Organization
convention 169 ratified by Colombia and turned into Law 21 of 1991. People feel that even
if the fate of the river is to serve the Anchicaya
´hydroelectric plant, the river is tied to the life
of their communities. EPSA should obtain environmental licences or consider the rights of
people living below the dam, as some people in the river say “we must be consulted”. This
position has been supported by the Office of Ethnic Affairs at the Ministry of the Interior
and Justice. However, regional environmental governance institutions seem to be doing
little to facilitate conditions that advance community consultation on development or
natural resource management.
Environmental governance institutions in Anchicaya
´
The Cauca Valley Development Authority (CVC) is entrusted with environmental regulation
and management of the watershed. Anchicaguen˜oshave mixed views about it. On occasions
the institution has offered valuable support; for example, the CVC biologist who, according
to a village leader, “prepared the best report about what happened in Anchicaya
´[after the
2001 incident] and helped us collect important evidence for the legal process against
EPSA”. In addition, the CVC offers technical assistance in agroforestry and established a
rice thresher project that people complain did not work. In an interview in Buenaventura,
a regional CVC programme official described active work in Anchicaya
´in natural resource
management, environmental education and environmental services. Yet in Anchicaya
´, some
people criticise the CVC for failing to sanction “pollution in the river and not backing the
community in the lawsuit against EPSA”. A village committee leader believes that the
CVC “has money interests” and with the City of Buenaventura “receives hydropower trans-
fers that by law must be used for basic sanitation, which they are obviously neglecting to do”,
thus “wasting what belongs to the communities affected by hydropower projects”.
Incompetence and corruption in the CVC have been widely documented. As Colom-
bia’s leading weekly news magazine Semana reports, the CVC went from being a top
16 M. Velasco
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example of public administration to being dominated by regional politiquerı
´a– or the poli-
tics of abuse of power and corruption (Semana 2011). This organisation of 600 employees
and a budget of 206 billion pesos (145 million US$) became political spoils managed by a
board of directors that is supposed to represent business organisations and the community,
but is allegedly controlled by the network of former Valle del Cauca senator Juan Carlos
Martı
´nez Sinisterra. Martı
´nez was arrested on charges of “para-polı
´tica”, or supporting
paramilitary groups, and is widely believed to control regional politics from prison.
The Attorney General found “serious deficiencies in the implementation of the CVC’s
action plans”, including awarding contracts to NGOs that lacked credentials, the use of the
institution to employ political quotas and the misappropriation of CVC assets including
shares in other companies or plots of land (Semana 2011). The CVC and the municipalities
of Buenaventura and Dagua have received electricity transfers. Only in 2005 and 2006 they
collected 10.6 billion pesos (5.6 million US$) to invest in the Anchicaya
´basin (Defensorı
´a
del Pueblo 2007). According to the Comptroller General, in 2006 the CVC and the City of
Buenaventura had destined no more than 10% of these royalties to social investment, and in
2007 the CVC had failed to execute about 13.5 billion pesos (6.75 million US$) of transfers
(Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2007).
At that time, the CVC claimed that electricity transfers were not invested because an
“Environmental Management and River Ordination Plan for the Anchicaya
´Basin” had
not been designed. They also alleged that social investment in the Anchicaya
´River was
limited by Article 2 of Decree 1933 of 1994 establishing that electricity transfers can
only be invested up to the point of catchment (Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2007). Article 2
defines watershed as the area comprising the main river and its tributaries to the point of
the dam, apparently excluding areas below the dam. However, article 5 of the same law
lets municipalities use these funds for sanitation and environmental improvement anywhere
it finds necessary as established in locally devised Municipal Development Plans. The law,
therefore, does not exonerate them for failing to invest part of the funds in the Anchicaya
´
communities located below the dam, though these are matters for technical debates by legal
experts. As of 2013, I could not find more formal information on the state of transfers or
social investment.
To address the aforementioned problems, a citizen’s oversight committee was created in
2007 and training sessions on fiscal transfers from the electricity sector were facilitated. The
training sessions were carried out, but by 2007 the oversight committee was not functioning
due to low community participation (Defensorı
´a del Pueblo 2007). It is important to note
that transportation costs in Anchicaya
´are high. Gasoline is expensive and there are a
limited number of motorboats to make long-distance travel, which complicates community
participation in venues far away from the river.
Discussion of findings and conclusions
The reforms of the 1990s decentralised politics and recognised different forms of property
rights and socio-economic uses of land. Based on their cultural relations to riparian environ-
ments, Afro-Colombians from the Pacific Coast were recognised as a special category of
political actor organised in customary institutions with rights to collective lands. Their
ethnic rights ultimately represent a socio-environmental justice claim and the government’s
formal acceptance of multiculturalism. Around the same time, the hydroelectric company
passed from government to private hands, and its social functions from serving the devel-
opment process, as defined by national political elites, to generating utilities for
shareholders.
Local Environment 17
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Neither the constitutional reforms nor the specific policies to address natural resource
governance sufficiently altered old ways of doing politics. Clientelism and local corruption
remained entrenched. In Anchicaya
´, save for a few individuals working within specific
bureaucracies, decentralised entities (i.e. the CVC and municipal governments) sidestepped
customary authorities. Government investigations and journalistic reports not only demon-
strate how institutions such as the CVC were used for rent-seeking, but they also underscore
alignments between specific local politicians and illegally armed groups. The government is
currently targeting illegally armed groups in “poorly governed rural zones” such as Buena-
ventura to establish a full civilian government presence (Isacson 2012). But the strategy is
simply leading to more militarisation. As evidenced in Anchicaya
´, militarisation incences
people who were waiting for a civilian state presence but who are rather seeing how cus-
tomary authorities are ignored in local matters of security or development.
The legal vicissitudes in the case against EPSA further demonstrate that mediation and
conflict resolution institutions favour energy investments while undermining the socio-
environmental rights of this ethnic minority. Not only is EPSA represented by one of
Colombia’s largest law firms, but it is also part of a strategic sector of the economy.
Growth in Colombia’s energy sector (which includes nickel, coal, gas and electricity) has
increased by 48% in the past decade, and hydropower in particular has grown by 20%
between 1975 and 2008 (Unio
´n Temporal ...2010). The energy sector is sustaining
fiscal stability and sheltered the economy during the 2008 financial crisis (Unio
´n Tem-
poral ... 2010). Given the strategic importance of this sector, favouring the legal claims
of weakly organised communities could affect investor confidence in energy development
if it motivates other communities to follow suit.
The courts were used strategically by influential actors to confuse responsibilities,
blame the victims or avoid culpability. But ultimately, the Constitutional Court’s conclusive
overturn of the case on the basis of legal technicalities disregarded environmental rights and
denied a politically disenfranchised community access to justice by laying on them the
burden of proof and discrediting the quality of information that they were reasonably
able to provide such as oral histories or locally generated ethnographic information. The
court’s judgement was based on defending the fundamental right to due process of the
hydroelectricity company, overturning the legal and technical bases under which lower
courts had judged in favour of the ethnic collective rights. In a 2012 public declaration
in response to the Constitutional Court’s ruling, Anchicaya
´’s Community Council stated
that:
This ruling derides our fundamental rights to life with dignity, health, a healthy environment
and other ethno-territorial rights [...] It also creates a negative precedent of access to justice
for other communities affected by large companies and distorts and disrupts the legal pro-
cedures undertaken by affected individuals and communities. (Consejo Comunitario Rı
´o
Anchicaya
´2012)
By applying expert technical know-how in exclusion of other forms of evidence, the Con-
stitutional Court also failed to rule in favour of socio-environmental justice. This lends
credence to the idea that conflicts over water – a social and material good intrinsically
connected to fundamental human rights and embedded in historical and sociocultural con-
texts – should be politicised (Joy et al.2014). Furthermore, in a multicultural setting legal
experts should study the type of local information that a community subjected to high
levels of structural violence can reasonably bring forth to a court of law as evidence
(cf. Callewaert 2002, p. 258). This is particularly important for addressing the rights of
18 M. Velasco
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black Colombians from riparian environments and for developing multicultural insti-
tutions. These communities contextualise current predicaments within a longer historical
process and contest with historical facts their sustained exclusion in order to equip ordin-
ary people with arguments to vindicate their collective claims (Khittel 2001). Disregarding
locally produced information denies ethnic minorities equal protection of the law, and
frustrates the decentralisation of justice and the development of legal plurality.
In conclusion, even if decentralised environmental governance and ethnic rights insti-
tutions enabled local authorities, organising in a hostile political environment characterised
by violence and corruption overwhelms participation. Furthermore, if Colombia adapted
multiculturalism as a principle, courts must carefully balance different types of evidence
when deciding on the fundamental rights of historically marginalised and currently discri-
minated peoples (cf. Song 2007). Some of the lower courts had in effect ruled in favour of
the communities, but saw their jurisprudence overturned by the Constitutional Court.
Ignoring the legal responsibilities of the culpable institutions not only undermines
different legal conceptions of land and local organisation, but it is also produces an uncon-
stitutional system based on devaluing poor people’s time, bodies, knowledge and proper-
ties, and denying access to justice to minority communities.
Acknowledgements
First, I wish to express sincere respect for the people of Anchicaya
´, for everything they do to conserve,
love and struggle for the health and vitality of their river. Research for this paper would not have been
possible without the support and trust afforded to me by Silvano Caicedo. I am also in gratitude with
Jorge Segura, and the people of ONUIRA and the Greater Council of the Anchicaya
´River, who
shared their time to organise meetings and coordinate my visit. I am also indebted to Efraı
´n Jaramillo,
Gloria Salinas and Fernando Castrillo
´n, my colleagues, mentors and friends at the Colectivo de Trabajo
Jenzera. I want to thank Argermiro Baquiasa, a traditional healer from the indigenous council of Cris-
tianı
´a (Antioquia). He came along with me as a delegate from Cristianı
´a, and gracefully shared his com-
munity’s pilot governance experience with leaders in Anchicaya
´. His visit provided immediate value to
leaders who collaborated and networked with Mr Baquiasa. I also want to acknowledge Chiesie Salinas,
an ecology student at the time, for travelling with me to accompany a fellow female researcher in what is
normally a man’s world. The analysis I present owes a great deal to the thoughts, viewpoints and knowl-
edge shared by all the people with whom I came into contact. However, I take responsibility for the
interpretations presented of Anchicaya
´’s complex reality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by a 2011 grant from Colorado State University’s Center for Collaborative
Conservation’s Fellows Program.
Notes
1. Of Buenaventura’s 324,000 people, 89% are considered poor. Ten per cent of the municipality’s
population lives in the rural area (mostly in riverine communities). Only 46% of Buenaventura’s
rural households have access to electricity, 28% to running water, 8% to sewerage and 6% to
landline telephones. About 38% of the rural population is illiterate. In comparison, 96% of Bue-
naventura’s urban households have access to electricity, 82% to running water, 66% to sewerage
and 34% to landline telephones. The urban illiteracy rate stands at 14% (DANE 2005).
Local Environment 19
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2. Resolutions 18-1527 of 2008 and 18-1193 of 2010.
3. Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos. Mapa de Tierras, August 2012. Available from: http://www.
anh.gov.co/media/asignacionAreas/2m_tierras_220812_2.pdf [Accessed 10 September 2012].
4. See for example ONUIRA’s 2009 press release against coca fumigations in nearby Naya River.
Available from: http://afgj.org/colombian-community-gardens-fumigated [Accessed 24 May
2012].
5. Palenque el Congal, ASO Mano Negra, Community Council “Black Rebirth” of Timbiquı
´, Com-
munity Council of the San Francisco River, National Association of Pescadores Artesanales and
CENSAT-Agua Viva.
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