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Introduction The Guajira Peninsula in South America hosts one of the largest low sulfur content coal reserves in the world. This identification led to Colombia and international coal mining institutions’ increased interest in the post mid-1970s. The Guajira Peninsula is also home to Colombia’s highest concentration of Indigenous persons in the country. El Cerrejón has become the largest opening mining operation on the planet, directly coinciding with Indigenous groups that have been present in the region for centuries prior to the project’s inception. Geography The Guajira Peninsula, or La Guajira as it is known in the region, is at the farthest north extension of the South America. The region is occupied by both Colombia and Venezuela, with Colombia having the greatest amount of land comparatively. Colombia’s region of the peninsula is governed as the La Guajira state while the rest is a piece of Venezuela’s Zulia state. (Zapach 1997, pg. 13). La Guajira is divided geographically into northern and southern counterparts. Northern Guajira, or Alta Guajira, is a dry and arid climate with limited rainfall throughout the year. It typically receives an average of 200mm of annual rainfall. However, the rainfall evaporates at higher rate than its precipitation rate. Wet season takes place a quarter of the year during the autumn months of September, October, and November (Zapach 1997, pg. 13). Alta Guajira’s position near different bodies of water and the Equator positions itself for a series of strong winds from the Caribbean Sea. Harsh winds inhibit the area’s ability for large amounts of rainfall to occur in addition to higher elevation inciting a quicker condensation process. Alta Guajira is not a location feasible for consistent and sustainable agriculture. Zapach notes this area is characterized by “large sand dunes and areas covered in rocks, spiny divi-divi trees, and cacti [due to] wildlife that was once so abundant [the land] has now been decimated by many factors, namely overhunting, climatological changes, and pastoralism” (1997, pg. 13). Land near the Sierra de Macuira is the most hospitable for raising livestock and sporadic seasons of agriculture. Southern Guajira, also known as the tropical desert to its inhabitants, varies in climate compared to its northern neighbor. Rainfall distribution occurs twice annually, with periods of rainfall occurring between March and June and also between August and December (Zapach 1997, pg. 15). Rainfall during these seasons aggregates approximately 200 mm and less than 50 mm during the dry months. Limited rainfall is difficult for Indigenous groups to irrigate their land for agriculture and raising livestock. The Rancheria River is the water source which makes this possible. Indigenous groups utilize different methods for collecting limited amounts of rainwater during dryer months, including manmade chasms of water, which are reopened as the dry season approaches. Indigenous Groups in La Guajira For centuries prior to Spanish conquest in greater Latin America, the Wayuu people have existed on the Guajira Peninsula. The Wayuu are the largest group of Indigenous people present between the Colombian-Venezuelan political borders on the Peninsula. The Colombian National Indigenous Organisation, ONIC, cited in 1997 and 2001 that there were approximately 144,003 Wayuu people in Colombia comprising 48% of La Guajira’s population and 20% of Colombia’s overall Indigenous population (1997). The Wayuu group is the predominant Indigenous group in La Guajira, with multiple clans and subsets of the group in their own respective boundaries throughout the region. Compared to other Indigenous groups in the Western Hemisphere, the Wayuu never fully conceded to their conquistadors, most notably the Spanish. Several European powers attempted to colonize the area independent from Spanish connquistadors. These colonizers included the Dutch, German, and English. These powers viewed Indigenous groups as profitable through kidnapping members of the local community populations in order to sell as slaves in the Antilles (Zapach 1997, pg. 19). The Wayuu notably adapted their lifestyles as their colonizing powers were focused on creating a sustaining series of colonies on the Peninsula for their own exploitative processes. In the mid-16th century, the Wayuu engaged in trade with European settlers and travelers to the Peninsula. The most traded item were different species of livestock. The Wayuu also learned animal processing strategies to sustain livestock in this region (Zapach 1997, pg. 19). The Wayuu adapted to these new techniques efficiently, and used these techniques to their benefit in combating prevalent nutrition issues within this community. The Peninsula’s undependable climate throughout the year left Wayuu groups, particularly women and children, subject to malnutrition and periods of extended starvation and famine. Learning how to properly raise and maintain livestock worked as an advantage as a readily available food supply if traditional agricultural methods were not sufficient for a given year’s needs. Indigenous groups also traded goods including animals, pearls, and salt to European colonial powers in exchange for arms and ammunition, particularly from the English, Dutch, and French. These three colonial powers became an important asset for the Wayuu and vice versa. The English, Dutch, and French were interested in becoming a trade power in that region to combat the Spanish monopoly in greater Central and Southern America. The Wayuu used these tools of combat in order to defeat Spanish acquisition of their land and cultural ways of living in the late 16th and early 17th centuries (Zapach 1997, pg. 20). Since colonial interest in this area, the Wayuu have proved to become more successful than some Indigenous groups in the Americas. The culture of resistance and utilization of unconventional materials is an asset in terms of preserving culture and language. The Wayuu maintained contact with Europeans and Spaniards over a cumulative period of five hundred years. Adoptive methods of herding and raising livestock from Europeans fueled the Wayuu independence lifestyle. During Spain’s colonization of Colombia, the Wayuu were able to maintain their independent lifestyle away from general mainstream influences. Zapach (1997) notes in her studies of La Guajira and the Wayuu people that this group often appears as if it were “untouched” by the rest of society. Their homes and methods of living remain free of modern influence. In present day, the Guajira Peninsula consistently maintains the highest concentration of Wayuu and Indigenous people in Colombia. Until the Cerrejón project, the Wayuu have generally resisted efforts by Colombia to join the greater Colombian culture. The late 20th century saw Indigenous groups increasingly left the Peninsula to find work opportunities in cities. This is predominately true of Wayuu groups in Venezuela’s Zulia state (Zapach 1997, pg. 22). El Cerrejón Coal Mining Project Project Origins Coal deposits existed in La Guajira prior interest in the area for coal mining. The coal is an attractive resource because of its low sulfur content in comparison to other mined coal in South America. Esson, currently Exxon, is known to have explored the Peninsula in the late 1910s through its subsidiary company TROCO, the Tropical Oil Company (Hernandez 1984, pg. 15). Interest in La Guajira grew at a cause of the 1970s world energy crisis as countries around the globe searched for additional sources, as well as focusing on their own respective position as a competitive power. In 1973, the federal government of Colombia declared the current El Cerrejón area of La Guajira as a special reserved zone that included the self-proclaimed rights of Colombia’s government to extract and utilize the coal as they see fit (Hernandez 1984, pg. 15). These self-proclaimed rights were transitioned to government-controlled Ecopetrol, formerly focused on the control and extraction of off-shore petroleum. Multinational resource institutions including Texaco and Exxon later received these rights as a partnership initiative to mine for the coal. The Colombian government created its own company, Carbocol, to represent itself in negotiations of El Cerrejón. Carbocol’s directors included executives of Ecopetrol and other Colombian-based resource extraction companies. Carbocol signed a formal Contract of Association with fellow energy extraction companies the International Colombia Resources Corporation and Intercor, a Colombian subsidiary of Exxon (Hernandez 1984, pg. 16). The contract defines each key players’ role in the inception and execution of the project. Carbocol and Intercor share joint responsibility and liability of project expenses and split the Project’s revenue. Both corporations also assumed responsibility of equal participation at meetings held quarterly regarding the project. Land Acquisition The players involved needed the physical land space in La Guajira to extract coal. Construction in La Guajira began with the Colombian federal government’s 1980 commercial declaration. The declaration was the beginning of an invasion of La Guajira and the Wayuu people. Long term effects of the declaration according to Hernandez (1984) include, “the loss of significant areas of traditional land resulting from the land acquisition for the project, the initiation of road construction, and the militarization of the Guajira by the anti-narcotics squads” (1984, pg. 17). The Wayuu and other Indigenous Colombian groups in Guajira are title-less landowners. Colombia’s laws regarding land rights protects people and groups who have lived and worked on an area of land for a period of over two decades. Land acquisition in the lower half of the Peninsula, where more than half of indigenous groups reside, was guided by wealthier landlords with greater knowledge of estate laws. Wealthier landlords stole the land from Indigenous groups who inhabited their land upon hearing the benefits of selling land to the Cerrejón Project. Titles re-granted to landlords for the Project were deemed illegal according to Colombian law. Hernandez (1984) states that “Colombian Law 31 of 1967 recognized that indigenous ancestral land, even if untitled, legally belongs to the indigenous group that has occupied it” (1984, pg. 19). Additional Colombian law states that without official titles to land in the Guajira region, lands right challenges against newly-issued ownership can only occur within five years of issue. INCORA, Instituto Colombiano de Reforma Agraria, receives on average, over a hundred inquiries of Indigenous peoples who face eviction on an annual basis due to El Cerrejón. Only ten of these requests for appeal complete the formal application process (Hernandez 1984, pg. 19). Land acquisition in the northern section of La Guajira differs because of widely upheld views across the region that this land was ancestral and sacred. Anthropologists and researchers from the United States and Canada also upheld this view through their work in the region. Indigenous groups in this area were in the legal standing to keep and maintain their land as they had when the commercial declaration designated 29,000 hectares of land for El Cerrejón’s port of entry construction. Because these groups do not have a representative organization to formally recognize and bureaucratically charge other institutions for injustices, they were vulnerable to attack against larger national and multi-national companies. The Indigenous were able to self-govern as they had for centuries. On the contrary, without an official title to the land the Project disregarded Indigenous natural rights to the land. Current Stages of the Project El Cerrejón has garnered praise as one of the most progressive coal mines in the world. Cerrejón grew to become the largest opencast coal mining operation in the world, a progressive move to the coal mining industry and experts. Cerrejón reached a coal production of 31.3 Mt throughout 2008 with an increase in production that was expected to reach 42 Mt in 2011 (Quintero et al. 2009, pg. 197). Cerrejón’s production has rendered Colombia as the “fourth largest coal exporting country in the world … [with a] growing market consumption rates in the Germany, Holland, Denmark, North America, and the United Kingdom” (Quintero et al. 2009, pg. 197). Environmental and coal mining experts have identified generational issues with the spontaneous combustion of coal within the project. Apart from safety for individuals working within the mine itself, a long term effect includes the health and environment for communities in La Guajira who receive coal deposits in their ground water or are subject to sufficient inhalation (Quintero et al. 2009, pg. 208). Human Rights Violations In recent years, El Cerrejón has garnered a considerable amount of negative attention from international humanitarian organizations. El Cerrejón takes place within Colombia’s border on the Guajira Peninsula. The early 2000s, namely 2004, marked a mass exodus of Indigenous Wayuu populations into nearby Venezuela. The United Nations’ Refugee Agency, UNHCR, registered over three hundred Wayuu people in Venezuela’s Zulia state. Indigenous groups on the Guajira Peninsula can travel freely between the two nations as Wayuu Indigenous territory transcends both countries (UNHCR 2004). A recent piece of the El Cerrejón project is the damming of the Rancheria River, a natural resource for Indigenous groups who rely on subsistence agriculture in the southern part of the Peninsula. The damming process of El Cerrejón included diverting the Rancheria River sixteen miles away from its current position to reach larger farms and additional mining sites (Kearns 2015). As this process of the mining project continues, Indigenous groups, particularly the Wayuu, filed formal complaints and petitions to the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights against Colombia’s federal government. In doing so, groups fought for the process of damming the river would be halted entirely, postponed for further development, or the proprietors of this subproject would seek alternative water sources. Cerrejón and the multinational companies associated with the project utilize the river for their coal extraction across the Guajira Peninsula. Javier Rojas Uriana, the legal representative for the Association of Traditional Indigenous Authorities of the Wayuu Shipia Wayuu (ATIAWSW), remarked in early 2015 that the river diversion be halted entirely so that Indigenous populations are not fleeing Colombia into Venezuela, relying on Venezuela for aid, and Indigenous children are not suffering from malnutrition or starvation (Kearns 2015). Since the ATIAWSW has followed legal action against the proprietors of the project, the case is now moving into international human rights court where it is garnering attention from human rights activists all over the world. Indigenous groups are proactive in conducting measures and gathering statistics regarding the destruction the project has caused. From 2011 to 2014, a minimum of 5,000 Wayuu children have died from starvation due to the lack of agriculture or subsistence farming on the Peninsula. Local Indigenous leaders estimate that the statistic is closer to 14,000 based on ground level observation. Additionally, a study by the Ombudsman Wayuu within the Peninsula in 2014 noted that a minimum of 37,000 Wayuu children were diagnosed with malnutrition over the same three year period (Kearns 2015). Wayuu groups have since started to look to Venezuela’s border within the Peninsula because of its proximity and the overlap of sacred Indigenous lands in the Zulia state. Some Wayuu groups have applied and received refugee status according to the UNHCR in Venezuela to avoid the growing Cerrejón mine (UNHCR 2004). Colombia’s federal and local governments in La Guajira responded to growing concerns and injustices against Indigenous groups by sending federal aid over a series of months in 2013 and 2014. Colombia fueled approximately $15 million to La Guajira to combat malnutrition and rising rates of starvation. The multinational corporations working in this area did not respond to the groups’ documented need with the Colombian government. Government officials in La Guajira did not allocate the funding appropriately according to the ATIAWSW. Legal representative Uriana noted in an address in La Guajira, “‘the measure they have taken have been insufficient and Cerrejón, with the permission of the national government, now benefits from the only source of water that we have, leaving the community suffering from thirst and because of that many lives have been lost” (Kearns 2015). Guajira’s Indigenous community has stated that it does not want to invoke sympathy from other Colombians or human rights activists around the world. Instead, the greater Wayuu community is focused on building solidarity between northern and southern Guajira Indigenous groups when presenting injustices to Colombian officials, as well as in an international setting. Wayuu rights’ attorney Carolina Sachia Moreno has identified that methods of protest by groups in this region are because Colombian land ownership laws do not extend to communal or bodies of water (Kearns 2015). Cerrejón executives in tandem with the Colombian government have blocked off a resource which cannot be exclusively owned or given priority to one entity over another group. Indigenous groups in La Guajira formed resistance movements through methods of media to connect and outreach to anyone who wishes to learn more about this effects of this project. “The River that they Stole,” alternatively El rio que se robaron, is a documentary by Colombian journalist Gonzalo Guillen, who aimed to put forward a critical lens on the effects of Cerrejón upon Indigenous Wayuu groups. Petitions have also circulated around Colombia in order for the federal government to take notice of the injustices committed against the Indigenous community in La Guajira.