REUTERS
Tuesday, 21 September 1999
 

Colombia Indians vow fight to death over oil

BOGOTA -- Ancient Indian beliefs and multinational business were on a collision course as Colombia's U'wa tribe threatened to commit mass suicide after a U.S. oil firm won drilling rights to disputed ancestral lands Tuesday.

``We are looking at the information to see what action the community will take. Mass suicide is one option we are considering,'' Evaristo Tegria, a spokesman for the U'wa tribe, told Reuters by phone from Cubara, the main town on the tribe's reservation.

After a seven-year land wrangle, Colombia's Environment Ministry granted Occidental Petroleum Corp a permit to sink the first test well in the northeast Samore block, just outside the recently enlarged U'wa reservation.

The 500,000 acre (209,000 hectare) exploration block is tipped to harbor up to 2.5 billion barrels of crude, which would help ensure Colombia's energy needs well into the next millennium.

But the 5,000-member U'wa tribe insist the entire Samore block, including parts outside the government-approved reservation, was the territory of its semi-nomadic ancestors.

``The community must consider how best to defend its social, cultural, territorial and political rights,'' Tegria added.

According to the U'was long-established spiritual beliefs, drilling for oil on its tribal lands that span the cloud forests and plains of northeast Colombia, is tantamount to sucking the lifeblood out of Mother Earth.

Occidental was originally granted an exploration contract for the Samore block in 1992 but suspended all work after carrying out just $12 million of seismic surveying because of U'wa protests.

At the time the U'wa threatened that they would commit mass suicide to prevent encroachment on their land. This tactic is said to have been used by many of their ancestors to escape capture at the hands of Spanish conquistadors 500 years ago.

The U.S. multinational currently operates the 140,000 barrel per day Cano Limon field in northeast Arauca province.

But based on reserve estimates Samore promises to be one of Colombia's largest-ever oil finds, possibly as big as the 440,000 barrel per day Cusiana-Cupiagua complex operated by BP Amocoin the eastern plains.

Oil is Colombia's top export, bringing in some $2.5 billion per year in foreign reserves. But output is currently stagnated at about 850,000 bpd and the country faces the prospect of having to import oil again by 2004 if no major new finds are made.

In an apparent effort to defuse U'wa protests and open the way to Colombia's continued energy self-sufficiency, the government last month enlarged the U'wa reservation from 98,000 acres (40,000 hectares) to more than 543,000 acres (220,000 hectares).

Conveniently, however, Occidental's proposed Gibraltar 1 test well, located near the town of Toledo was just a few miles outside the limits of the new reservation.

Occidental has not issued a formal statement on Tuesday's decision by the Environment Ministry. But technically, work on sinking the 14,000 foot test well, expected to cost some $30 million, could begin immediately.

In addition to their own protests, the U'wa have successfully mobilized an international campaign.

Last month, Steve Kretzmann, a spokesman for the California-based U'wa Defense Working Group, said the enlarged reservation deal should not be seen as ``a quid pro quo for oil development''.

He argued that the oil industry had failed to bring social development to impoverished regions of Colombia and warned drilling for crude near U'wa lands could spark political violence and generate social tensions.

``In Colombia oil is a vision of development for the elites and a way of paying off international debt. But it does not help communities develop whether they are spiritually opposed to oil or not,'' Kretzmann said.