Embera Katio lands in El Chocó photo courtesy El Tiempo
by Sasha / Earth First! Newswire
In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a Colombian tribunal halted the operations of 11 mining companies in the western part of the country last week, restoring the land to members of the internally displaced Embera Katio tribe.
The ruling has restored 50,000 hectares in the municipality of Bagadó in the Department of El unceded to more than seven thousand Embera Katio.
Chocó is among the top ten most important hotspots in the world in terms of its concentration of both biodiversity and climate change-mitigating capacity.
The key corporations affected are AngloGold Ashanti, as well as Exploraciones Choco Colombia, Gongora and El Molino.
In 2009, the Embera halted US corporation Muriel Mining Corporation for failing to give prior and informed consent. As one representative declared, “If Muriel Mining does not end its exploration of our sacred lands, we will go up to the mountain and remove the machines ourselves.”
In the years that followed, Embera community members and leaders were harassed and assassinated by thugs related to the mining companies and the state. According to the Colombian National Indigenous Organization, the Embera have been among the most heavily affected communities in the ongoing armed conflict against Indigenous peoples in Colombia.
Since President Santos declared the week before the ruling passed that the peace process with FARC would soon be complete, the recent decision to restore Embera lands is being viewed as part of a restorative process with guerrilla groups in what has been touted as Santos’s ongoing attempts to end the decades-long Civil War.
Drug violence has indeed pushed into Chocó over the last decade, threatening the survival of numerous Indigenous peoples, but much of the violence is directed against Indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombians in order to expropriate lands for mining and agrifuels production.
It is important to recognize that the Embera were not simply removed at a given time or even over a period of decades; they have remained in El Chocó fighting against mining companies for many years. Now that eleven mining companies are being removed from their lands, and exiled community members are being allowed to return, the Embera Katio tribe have effectively won their battle. It makes no sense to claim this as a kind of easy victory of the Santos regime.
If anything, this is a victory for everyone. The fact that the recent verdict has been tied to the peace process perhaps reveals the extent to which the Drug War has served as propaganda cover for the ultimate reason underlying the dispossession of Indigenous peoples: the seizure of lands for resource extraction. Hopefully, however, this verdict will mark a milestone in a restorative process in Colombia and throughout the Western Hemisphere, as unceded lands are returned and settler colonialism reversed.