The rights of the Wayúu people and water in the context of mining in La Guajira, Colombia: demands ofrelational water justice

Abstract

This article addresses how water is being represented and positioned by Wayúu people in order to claim and defend water’s territorial rights against the expansion of the Cerrejón coal mine, in La Guajira, Colombia. In a semidesertic region in Colombia, Cerrejón (the largest open-pit coal mine in Colombia and Latin America, and the 10th biggest in the world) has created environmental inequalities and control and infrastructure arrangements that transform local water dynamics, affecting Wayúu people in a differentiated way. Cerrejón has intervened the territory technically and environmentally, affecting the river Ranchería and its water streams, which has dispossessed and transformed Wayúu peoples’ cultural and daily relationships with water’s territories. In response, the organization Fuerza de Mujeres Wayúu (FMW) has not only proposed water defense strategies and resistance against mining, but also opened debates about water’s territories and water’s rights. For the FMW the defense of water’s territories (sacred places in which the spirits of water inhabit) implies that Wayúu territories and water are in an embedded relationship which is not possible to fragment or separate either by mining processes or by institutional policies. Their proposals allows us to rethink the notion of water justice, and access to water by humans and nonhumans.

Indigenous Environmental Justice within Marine Ecosystems: A Systematic Review of the Literature on Indigenous Peoples’ Involvement in Marine Governance and Management

“…Wider scholarship, which focuses almost exclusively on land and freshwater governance and management, has highlighted that spaces of misrecognition extend beyond the misrecognition of cultural identities and include the misrecognition of the land, water, plants and animals, and entire ecosystems [200,205]. At present, studies have concentrated on the misrecognition of Indigenous lands as "invaluable", "unused", and "wastelands" by the government, businesses, and other powerful interest groups (which include Indigenous lands lost/invaded/alienated following colonisation); following on from this terrestrial-centred work, there is a small amount of research that explored the lack of recognition afforded to Indigenous peoples' relationships with their freshwater spaces but virtually nothing about their saltwater environments [112,[206][207][208][209]. These labels make it easier for governments and companies to justify the placement of environmental risks (such as toxic waste disposal sites, nuclear power plants, oil and gas refineries, and mining operations) on Indigenous lands and close to Indigenous settlements, cultivations, herding or hunting grounds, as well as other sites of cultural significance [10,111,208].…”

Pueblos indígenas, recursos y gobernanza. Un análisis de la consulta indígena como parte de la Evaluación de Impacto Ambiental del proyecto hidroeléctrico Añihuerraqui, Región de la Araucanía, Chile

“…Para los pueblos indígenas la naturaleza es una fuente de vida y sagrada; un elemento esencial para la construcción de sus identidades étnicas. Desde su punto de vista lo no humano tiene un valor no traducible a valores económicos, lo que se contradice con la visión económica neoliberal que mercantiliza la naturaleza no solo para su explotación, sino también para poder cuantificar los impactos causados por la actividad humana (Ulloa, 2020).…”

“…Con la consolidación del modelo neoliberal desde la década de los años ochenta, la expansión de la minería, las empresas forestales, la agroindustria, pero también del sector energético, ha causado conflictos entre el Estado, el sector privado y las comunidades locales afectadas por los proyectos neoextractivistas asociados (Bebbington, 2012;Peralta, Bebbington, Hollenstein, Nussbaum & Ramírez, 2015). La ecología política ha evidenciado cómo los diferentes intereses en cuanto al desarrollo económico y también el uso de los recursos naturales se manifiestan en este tipo de disputas (Castillo, Espinoza & Campos, 2017), y cual es el rol de las distintas relaciones hombre-naturaleza (Swyngedouw, 2004;Swyngedouw, 2011;Swyngedouw & Copano, 2018), específicamente por parte de los pueblos indígenas (Escobar 2006;Ulloa, 2020) en estos contextos. La mayoría de los Estados latinoamericanos han ratificado el Convenio 169 de la OIT sobre pueblos indígenas y tribales (C169), y a raíz de lo mismo implementaron procesos de consulta frente al desarrollo de proyectos extractivistas (Walter & Urkidi, 2011).…”

Women’s resistance against the extractive industry: embodied and water dimensions

“…We advance the discussion by focusing on women’s organizing and particularly two triggering elements of it: water and embodiment. In fact, territorial conflicts surrounding conventional and unconventional natural resource extraction are not just land-based but revolve around the aquatic space (Oslender, 2002) and decolonized notions of water territory (Ulloa, 2020; Zaragocin, 2018), as source of life for people and land as well. Consequently, water pollution and/or scarcity results in women’s embodied experiences of suffering which motivate their organizing.…”