“It was very beautiful. There was plenty of food; the people here hardly ever got sick because everything was clean; there was a beautiful pond, unpolluted. This was what life used to be like here. It was very safe; you could go wherever you wanted, at any hour of the day or night…
“My house, mine and my husband’s, was a memory that was very dear to us… We had two bedrooms, a dining room. That was the dining room, a bedroom there, and there another bedroom. And the bathroom there. With the toilet there..!
“Lemon trees, squash, that’s how we supported ourselves. We supported ourselves with 300 or 400 lemons from that lemon tree there. We bought rice, lard . . . that helped us out. And over there was a grove of plantains.We had guava trees, plantains, a grapefruit tree, tangerines.
“Look how it’s all destroyed. They destroyed everything.”
This was how Aura Pérez, a resident of the village of Tabaco in Colombia’s remote Guajira peninsula, described her home before it and the rest of the village was razed by Cerrejón Zona Norte, the largest open-pit coal mine in the world. Cerrejón is a huge, gaping gash 30 miles long by 5 miles wide in the hot, dry landscape. On August 9, 2001, mine employees, supported by armed security guards and the national police and army, used bulldozers to level Tabaco. Four years later, Aura Pérez was dead.
“She died of impotence,” says her brother José Julio, who also was displaced when Tabaco was destroyed. “We lost our homes, we lost our land, we lost our community, we lost our livelihoods, we lost everything. When she became sick there was no way to get the medicine she needed.” Aura Pérez was one of 14 people who died after the villagers were displaced.
“We were thrown off our lands, we saw the authorities bulldoze our homes,” added Pedro Borja, another member of the community. “Here in Colombia the powers that be break their promises. For us there is no law. They have ruined our plans to study, our health. Cerrejón is one of the richest companies in Colombia, so why are we paying for this?”
This land has been inhabited for hundreds of years by the indigenous Wayuu people and also by mestizo peasants and Afro-Colombians—escaped slaves who set up communities next to indigenous peoples and adopted much of their culture. For generations, these communities have traded products and customs, creating a unique Guajira culture while maintaining distinct indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.
The Wayuu are the largest indigenous group in Colombia. In the northern part of the Guajira peninsula, where it is too dry for farming, they raise goats and cows; to the south, they also farm. Hunting and fishing contribute to their sustenance, as does temporary and migrant labor, in Colombia and across the border in Venezuela. They are organized in large matrilineal clans, which maintain residences in different parts of the peninsula. They’re known for their woven hammocks and shoulder-bags (mochilas), which they make for personal use as well as for sale in the small tourist market along the coast.
Before it was destroyed, Tabaco was the largest village in the area, with a population of about 700. It was the municipal center upon which the smaller villages of Tamaquito, Roche, Chancleta, and Patilla depended: It had a school, a health center, a Telecom (state telecommunications company) office, running water, electricity, a park, a church, and a cemetery. But Tabaco sat on top of coal, which sealed its fate—a fate determined long before the bulldozers showed up. In the early 1990s company representatives began to approach residents, asking them to sell their land. “They told us that we could continue to farm, that they didn’t plan to use the land,” José Julio explained. “They said they wanted the titles just for security’s sake. A lot of people sold, because it seemed like a gift. Even though the price they paid was laughably low, it was like getting something for nothing.”
But instead of improving, life began to get more difficult in Tabaco. Unoccupied lands around the village, which had been used for hunting, were disappearing into the mine. Ranches and farms owned by larger landowners, where Tabaco residents had worked, were sold off to the company. The Ranchería River, which had served many of the communities as a source of water and fishing, was turning brown, murky, and foul with run-off from the mining activities. As sources of work and livelihood withered away, people began to cave in to the company’s increasingly coercive offers; they began to sell their houses and leave. The company warned residents that the value of their properties was fading fast: Sell now, or be sorry later. By August 9, 2001, the community had shrunk significantly. It’s a process now playing itself out again in some of the smaller indigenous and Afro-Colombian villages threatened by the mine’s inexorable expansion.
Today, about 100 former residents of Tabaco remain organized as Tabaco in Resistance. They’ve lost their homes and mostly live with relatives or in inadequate quarters in the nearby town of Albania. They won’t settle with the company because they won’t give in on their key demand: They want to be recognized as a community. They are asking for collective negotiations, collective relocation, and reparations for the years, the families, and the community that they have lost.
“I have suffered in the flesh everything that has happened,” said María Isabel Ríos, one of the members of Tabaco in Resistance in Albania. “They kicked us out of our homes, they mocked us and violated our rights. My daughter Santiaga has nightmares, she suffers from nerves, eats her nails and hair. In her nightmares the police are destroying our houses. She is always asking whether they are coming back to attack us. Now we don’t have enough food. We feel weak and alone. In Tabaco we had a house with three or four rooms, now we are all in two rooms. We have gone through nine years of this process. We only have electricity in spurts; sometimes we only have water for one hour a day. Our children have endless colds and skin diseases that the hospital can’t cure. Our eyes burn, we have chest pains and headaches. This isn’t human: they have left us in ruins.”
The smaller communities of Tamaquito, Roche, Chancleta, and Patilla are barely clinging to life as the mine encroaches. Wilmer Palmesano, the president of the Community Council of Chancleta, explained what happened to his community as it lost access to its former means of livelihood: “In the 1980s the company started buying up land, and today we have nowhere left to sow crops, nowhere to put our animals. We’ve gone from being a productive community to a community of paupers. If you look around you can see the majority of houses are empty because people have abandoned them. We are drinking contaminated water, and they would not respond. Finally, after endless pressure, they started sending a water truck to supply us. Even though we are pretty much all unemployed, we have been raised on this land, and we don’t steal. With no land and no place to put our animals, we are talking about a radius of about 80 meters around this place, and beyond that the mine has bought up all the land and put their security guards on it—guards who patrol on horseback.”
“We want relocation, we want to stay together as a community,” Palmesano went on, reiterating a point made by many people during our visit there. The communities have lived and worked collectively for hundreds of years and are worth much more than the plots of land that their huts stand on. What is needed, we were told again and again, is a place, and the resources, to reweave the social fabric that has been rent to shreds by the coming of the mine.
“There’s been talk of coal for the world and progress for Colombia,” said Eder Arregoces Pinto, a member of the Chancleta Community Council, echoing the Cerrejón company’s slogan. “If that is so, we ask, to what country do the towns of Chancleta, Roche, and Tabaco belong? There are droves of young people just wandering around because there is no school, there is no work. What a paradox: We are surrounded by the world’s largest coal mine, and we don’t have enough to eat! Most of the families here can only eat one meal a day, all because we don’t have land. There is outrageous exploitation that fails to see that there are human beings living here, there are black and indigenous communities. The environmental situation is worse than critical. The government pursues those who plant bombs and kill people. But what about a company that is slowly killing people off with contamination? Is that not terrorist?”
The big picture
The labor, and the land, of indigenous and African-origin people of Latin America have supplied the prosperity of Europe and the United States for many centuries. The small communities of the Guajira survived because their arid and windswept peninsula held little of value to outsiders—until events in the rest of the world during the 1970s changed things. The oil crisis and environmental legislation prompted power companies to switch to cleaner coal rather than investing in improved technology. At the same time, there were ample public resources available to help U.S. companies increase profits by moving abroad. All of those circumstances led Exxon to close its mines in the United States and begin explorations in Colombia (in addition to oil production,