Colombian Gov’t Sells Out Indigenous Peoples’ Drinking Water To Western Mining Interests
May 15, 2017
Colombia’s Wayuú people have struggled to live without water since 2011, as a dam built that year has diverted the tribe’s only water source to a coal mine that consumes an astounding 17 million liters of water a day. The Wayuú say 14,000 children have died since the dam was built.
COLOMBIA— On Colombia’s arid Guajira Peninsula – a region famed for inspiring the magic realism of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García-Márquez – a quiet effort to eradicate the Wayuú people, Colombia’s largest indigenous group, has entered its sixth year. The Colombian government and Western mining corporations are complicit in this attempt to wipe the group off of Colombia’s map.
The victims of a devastating, manufactured drought, the Wayuú are fighting for their very survival, as thousands of children die every year. The deaths of nearly 5,000 children due to thirst or malnutrition have been documented since 2011, though the Wayuú themselves claim that the figure tops 14,000.
The Colombian government, as well as the Western media, have been eager to blame the drought on climate change and weather patterns like El Niño. But they have conveniently overlooked the 2011 construction of the Cercado Dam, which diverted the Ranchería River from its natural course. The government claimed that building the dam would improve the lives of everyone in the region by supplying nine towns with a second source of drinking water, employing 1,000 workers and providing irrigation for 18,500 hectares of farmland.
